


Sweetness on our tongues once more

by lapoesieestdanslarue



Category: If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio
Genre: Aka the epilogue we deserve, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 16:00:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15368136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoesieestdanslarue/pseuds/lapoesieestdanslarue
Summary: It’s funny, he thinks. He feels more at home with James looking at him than he has the whole months he’s been out of prison.





	Sweetness on our tongues once more

**Author's Note:**

> These two have had my heart since the first time I read this novel. Nearly a year and five re-reads later, I’ve finally given in and started writing them. Here’s hoping you enjoy x

It shocks him, really, how little James has changed. Oliver had wondered if he’d recognise him, with so much time having passed but when he finally catches a glimpse of him across that tiny Parisian street, he’s struck to his core at the sheer familiarity of it. 

James hasn’t seen him yet, sipping his coffee and making his way through a battered copy of _Twelfth Night_ , and it’s just like it was before, James being impossibly real and full of human intricacies and Oliver watching, studying. 

He’s hardly been made older by the years, skin still flawless and untouched by age, though slightly lost of that Californian sun, hair still full and blonde. He doesn’t look a day over twenty-one, since Oliver left him in their shared dorm. 

 

Oliver catches a glimpse of himself in a nearby shop mirror, and bar the slight change in physique, he could say the same for himself. It’s as if they’re under ice, trapped in the moment it all wrong. 

 

When he glances back, James is looking at him, eyes open in pure shock, his whole body tense. It’s as if he thinks he’s in a dream, and he’s worried that if he moves, it will dissipate from around him. 

It’s funny, he thinks. He feels more at home with James looking at him than he has the whole months he’s been out of prison.

~*~

 

“Oliver,” James breathes, clinging to him as if he were a drowning man and Oliver his only savior. His long arms are wrapped Oliver’s chest, his buried in the crook of his neck. Around them, people pass the two by, unawares of this momumentous moment, the lifetime’s worth of suffering and struggle it took to get here.

“Hi,” Oliver murmurs into the crown of his head, breathing deep in his smell— he still smells like James, and it springs tears in Oliver’s eyes. 

“Oliver,” he whispers as he holds him close, hugging him tight. _Oliver._

 

~*~

 

“Paris?” Oliver asks. They’re sitting a street over from where they’d met, on a bench looking out at the Seine. 

“I moved around a bit, at first. Paris has been... three months?”

 

“Where were you before?”

“England, at first. I lay low in a B&B in this tiny little village for a few months. Got myself together. Then Spain, Italy, down by the Amalfi Cost and up to Rome. Germany, for a bit. And then France. Nice and Bordeaux, the Vendèe and Normandy. Now this.”

“How do you afford it?”

“Life assurance,” James jokes, a morbid smile   
on his face. “No, I work, mostly. Wherever they’ll have me. Mostly restaurants or cafè’s. I saved up before I went, because I’d spent most of my summer wages from years before on the whole,” James waves a hand about, “Fake identity stuff.”

Oliver let’s out a small noise of understanding. “I only managed this because I remembered all those countries we said we’d visit, when we’d stay up late and talk about life after Dellecher. First was Venice and then—“

“— And then was Paris,” James finishes, a bitter twist of his lips at their edges.

 

“What took you so long to come?”

James is silent, for a bit, grappling for the right words. “The weight of it, I guess. I was always meant to be here with you. It seemed too much, too final. It made it real.” 

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember,” Oliver admits. 

James’ gaze darts up to him immediately, brow furrowed. “Why?”

“Memory is a fragile thing. I had my time to preserve and crystalize it, but I wasn’t sure, for you... if you’d lived so much life out time together would have been clouded over. Forgotten by other things, brighter things.”

“Not that fragile,” James disagrees with a shake of his head. “And I remember it all. Every moment of it.”

They’re silent then, for a while, watch the lights appear in water colour on the Seine. “So why not Venice?” Oliver asks. 

“Too many masks,” James explains. “I had enough of those.”

“It wasn’t all fake,” Oliver rebuffs, softly. “Not those first years. Not even the start of fourth year. It was just Ceaser—“

“Just Ceaser,” James spits. “Oliver, you’re an idiot if you think Gwendolyn and Frederick didn’t have us pegged from the start. You said so yourself, we played the same parts, all the time. Call it a box, or a mask, but they trapped us- and look what happened when they set us free.”

“Aren’t you angry?” James asks, incredulous. “You sit here, and you’re so calm about it all— I just don’t get it, Oliver. Dellecher, me, all of us. It ruined your life.“

Oliver shakes his head. “I can’t be angry at them,” he replies simply. 

“How?”

“Because it gave me you.” It’s simply said, punctuated only by Oliver’s eyes flicking down to his hands, folded in his lap. “I mean _God_ James I don’t know why you still haven’t got this. It was worth it, okay? When it was good, it was great. I’d never known happiness like I’d felt at Dellecher, do you get me? I know, now, that what they encouraged in us was wrong, but. But James, every day I got to spend with you. It was worth every second in prison.” He holds his hand up to silence any rebuff James might have. “I know it might sound obsessed or toxic or wrong.” His mouth screws up with the other pop words Meredith had thrown around when he’d tried to convey even half of this to her. “But it’s the truth. I’m the one who did the time but we all suffered it. It wasn’t only mine to bear.” 

“ _All are punish’d,_ ” James says softly. “Oliver, I— wasn’t it so far to fall?” 

Oliver looks up at him, gives him a soft, barely-there smile. The kind that says, I’ve answered this a thousand times. The kind that says the answer never changed, not once. “But it didn’t hurt at all.”

James sucks in a ravaged breath, lets it out, looks away. If he doesn’t compose himself now, he’ll burst into tears right there in the street. “If I were to get up now,” he starts, “if I were to bring to bring you back to my room. Would you come?” _Would you leave?_ Goes unsaid. 

Oliver is silent for a moment. His head is down, studied intently on James’ hand on the dark wood of the bench. He traces an absent pattern over the tanned skin with his still-pale index finger. He tries to conjure up the words to explain to James that he couldn’t possibly leave him now, or ever. He finally got him back. He tries to verbalize the wealth of feelings in his chest, in his heart, without bursting into tears. “Of course,” he settles on. It’s heavy and inadequate on his tongue, but it’s all he can do. “Always.”

~*~

They arrive to James’ place a few minutes later— the door clicking shut behind them. They stand there, in the hallway, silent, Oliver looking at James’ apartment and James looking at Oliver. Oliver turns back, his brown eyes meeting James’ baby blues and then—

Their mouths crash together, desperate and hungering, the weight of all their years worth coming to its fruition. James’s large hands cup either side of Oliver’s face, hard, as if he’s afraid Oliver will vanish from beneath him. 

“I’m sorry,” he gasps raggedly when they reluctantly pull away, coming up for air. “Oliver, I’m sorry—“

“It’s okay,” Oliver soothe, cupping his hand around James’. “It’s okay.” 

James collapses beneath him, sobbing into the dip of his neck. “I’m sorry,” he weeps, over and over again. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Oliver whispers into his brow. “Nothing at all.” It tastes slightly bitter on his tongue, but it’s the truth of it, Oliver knows. In this life, the next. It’s God’s honest truth of it.

 

~*~

The years wash away from them there, in between the sheets, just Oliver and James, and Oliver and James until they become OliverandJames— as it was always meant to be, Oliver can’t help but think. Them, at their most natural, fused together, inseparable, unbreakable. And when James looks at Oliver, melting under his chocolate eyes, it’s like a blind man who’s seen the sun for the first time.

 

~*~

Afterwards, both sweating and tangled up in each other but refusing to let go, Oliver wipes a tear from the track it was making down James’ cheek. 

“Sorry,” James mumbles, blinking furiously. 

“No need to be. Happy tears or sad tears?”

“Happy,” James says, his voice quietly breaking under his unveiled joy. 

Silences entrenches them like honey dripping from a spoon. In the comfortable quiet, there’s only their breathing, the joint beating of their hearts in synchronization, the roaming of eyes and hands as they relearn each other in a way that’s new and exciting but familiar and home all at once. 

“You remember Del Norte?” James asks, a hushed whisper. 

Oliver drags his eyes up from their entwined hands, eyebrows raised, a smirk playing at his lips. “How could I forget?” 

He remembers the way they slowly woke up, the way James had to steal a towel and then wait for a small bodega across the road to open up. The mortification mixed with sheer giddiness at the situation. He remembers the skimpy shorts they’d had to wear, his a bright yellow and James’ deep green, and the baggy tourist t-shirts. The way they’d shared a a punnet of dark red grapes, juice spilling down their chins and spitting the seeds onto the sand. Being so carefree in a way he can’t really remember ever being before, and wasn’t ever again. 

“I woke up before you,” James begins, his words drawled and slow, as if he were trying to string the perfect words together. “And I remember lying there in the sand and watching you sleep. Not in a creepy way, I just. I was so amazed, at you. At how lucky I was to know you, how terrified I was to love you. And then you started blinking, waking up. And you looked over at me, your eyes this brilliant colour against the pale sand, still half closed with sleep, and you gave me this smile, like you were just so content. 

“I used to have a dream, every night since you went away, that we were back on that beach. And you’d still be asleep, and you’d still give me that smile, and then once I’d muster up the courage to finally tell you how I felt, the tide would come up and take you, and I’d wake up and it’d—“ He breaks off, and Oliver leans over to press a kiss to the pained divot in his brow. “That’s where you lived, in my memory, for all those years. And now you’re here but I’m just.” His grip tightens around Oliver’s waist. “I’m terrified it’s a dream.” 

“It’s real,” Oliver murmurs, tracking kisses down the side of James’ face until he reaches his mouth, where their shared breaths mingle. “We’re real.”

“Oliver, I’m sorry,” James says once more, ragged against his lips, sounding guilty as a man in confession. 

“For what?”

“For letting you take the fall. For not stopping. For… bringing you here.”

‘But come what, come may, I do adore thee so, that danger shall seem sport, and I will go,” Oliver whispers, tracing the arch of James’ lips. “Not your fault. Not any of your fault.”

“And for not telling you. I’m sorry about that as well.” 

Now it’s Oliver’s turn to look pained. The memory, still partially fresh, of the yearning and pining that threatened to swallow him whole at times rises up in him. “You have to have known. Please tell me that you knew.”

James grasps his hand, presses a solid, grounding kiss to the palm of it. “I knew. I know. I’m sorry I was such a coward.”

Oliver shakes his head, tears spilling from eyes, his smile tender and soft and bursting, bursting, with love. “Me too.” He threads a hand through James’ hair. 

“Did you see Meredith?” James asks quietly. “After you got out?” Oliver can tell he’s trying to be as neutral as possible. He appreciates the effort.

“Yes,” he answers truthfully. “I slept with her.” The grip around his waist tightens ever so slightly. “Only because I thought you were gone.” And then loosens. “You know, I thought you wanted to be with Wren,” Oliver admits. 

“In—“

“In fourth year, yeah. I don’t… after Richard, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what I was feeling and how I was acting out on it. And once I, y’know, was with her, I could hardly feel anything. Everything I’d put into it for all those years, and it was just… empty. And the whole time, I was thinking about you, and what you’d say, and if you’d be as jealous of me as I was if you and Wren. That was my biggest fear, in there,” it’s a hushed confession, tinged with giddy love, “That I’d come out and you’d have this whole life without me— wife and kid, the dog and the white picket fence. That I’d be forgotten to you, and all I’d have was this love I had and words I never said.” 

A gentle thumb stroked over his cheekbone. “Oliver,” he says fondly, a love-stupid smile on his face. “You’re a damn fool if you think for one minute that I wasn’t crazy for you. _Hear my soul speak. Of the very instant that I saw you, Did my heart fly at your service._ ”

“We wasted so much time,” Oliver murmurs. 

“But we have time, now,” James replies, languid. “ _Make use of time, let not advantage slip.”_

“The rest of our lives,” he replies, smiling.

James beams at him, pulling him closer and nipping at his neck. “ _Minutes, hours, days, months and years with white hairs and a quiet grave.”_

Oliver curls into him, anchoring his hand at the base of James’ neck, smiling into his hair, letting himself be lost in James James James. “ _Come what sorrow can, It cannot countervail this exchange of joy, That one short minute gives me in your sight.”_

James breaks away from his neck, looking up at him with missed hair and eyes clouded with lust. “I love you,” he says, like its his only truth, the only thing holding him upright. 

“I love you,” Oliver replies, equally as full with years of hidden emotion, brimming to the surface with a force he’s never known before— he never knew you could be filled with this much love, and feeling, and hope, without bursting at the seems. He can imagine the bright light of their shared happiness spilling from them, erupting from their chests like pierced swords and coming from their fingertips like lightning bolts.

James swallows him in a kiss; and the light can be seen for miles.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated! Talk to me about these boys and you have the key to my heart tbh


End file.
